Done -operating aircraft maintains the sewers so that humans do not have to do so

in the morning From Christmas Eve 2016, residents of a house in Fraser, Michigan, strange pop music, pop, heard a sound from their walls. After he initially rejected it that the melting of the snow that falls from the surface, they soon realized the truth: the noise was the result of pressure on the brick outside the place while their house was slowly collapsing in a hole.

The house and many of the relative were evacuated, as the authorities evaluated the situation and identified its case: the collapsed sewage objection, threatens many houses and a long extension from the busy Fraser road 15 miles. It was hardly the beginning of the holiday season that anyone wanted to.

“This was the effect on our system and our society,” says Vince Astorino. As a director of operations at the Public Works Office in Makomb Province, he is responsible for overseeing the daily operations of the province’s wastewater infrastructure, including about 68 miles of sewage lines. “11 feet a diameter, nearly 70 feet, have seen a significantly reduced failure of wastewater flow. This section of tubes near the main port of our system, and about 800,000 residents depend on it to transport wastewater.”

The immediate procedure from ASTORINO and his team got the BYPASS systems in time to prevent sanitation from backup to the population homes, and in the end only one building – the house where the concept sound – demolition was heard. But nine months have passed until the extension of the violating tubes is replaced, about 4000 feet of it, completely. The direct cost of taxpayers reached about $ 75 million, and did not take into account the additional costs of residents and nearby companies as a result of the turmoil.

The key to preventing disasters like this is the regular examination of sewage lines, and the search for any cracks and east, if left without observation, can lead to the entry of the soil and the final collapse of the tube. But sewage pipes can be dark, tight, full of gas pockets, which makes examining large networks using traditional methods (usually there is a tied creeping, operating remotely equipped with a camera or even personally) is a slow and costly process, and is often dangerous.

This is where drones come. Designer and engineering to work in confined spaces, a new generation of flying robots is sent to the sewers to perform inspections in a safer and more efficient way.